[Aiwendil]

Lalwende wrote:

or he could be a steward for Aragorn as Denethor is.

This strikes me as a bit of a stretch. Gandalf has no particular association with Gondor over any other part of northeastern Middle-earth. I suppose that, in the absence of further information on Gandalf, some readers might interpret it this way, but it seems quite clear that this is not what either Gandalf or Tolkien intended.

Still not sure how much this could be read as Christian (as opposed to Eruist) though, as to get that interpretation we must first of all also accept that Eru is God. Sure he's God of Arda, but is he God? Even if he's Tolkien's interpretation of God (which is a most peculiar one - we've had this discussion many times and that seems to be the most common point agreed on), and therefore an allegorical God, then would all Christians read it that way, or would some indeed be deeply offended?

This strikes me as splitting semantic hairs. One might as well ask whether Milton's character is "really" Satan, or whether Allah of the Koran is "really" Yahweh of the Torah.

If you ask me, the question "is Eru God?" is only a semantic one. There are other questions one could ask, of course, that are not merely semantic - Are there differences between Eru as presented in the Silmarillion and the Judeo-Christian God as presented in the Torah, or in the New Testament, or in later theology? Does LotR contain more parallels with the Bible than with other myths? And so on. These are, I think, interesting and non-trivial questions. But it seems to me that there is a tendency to conflate them with one another, and with pseudo-questions, via imprecise wording and over-generalization.

I suppose I'm beginning to ramble. Anyway, with regard to Gandalf's line about being a steward - what I'm trying to say is that the question of whether Tolkien wrote this thinking of it as a Christian element is distinct from the question of whether it necessarily comes across as a specifically Christian element. Certainly, the line itself does not convey anything specifically Christian. My claim is only that, when we consider the probable meaning of the line (i.e. steward for Eru/Manwe), the time at which the line was added (in the revision), and Tolkien's claim that the work was consciously Christian in the revision, we have at least a single piece of evidence that he was not lying or mistaken when he made that claim.